


Do what must be done

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Between Episodes, Dubious Consent, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, F/M, Gaslighting, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mind Control, Mind Games, Mind Manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 12:49:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21476290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: She will unleash hellfire and do what must be done.
Relationships: Harry Greenwood/Macy Vaughn
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	Do what must be done

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm glad that the resolved the lost Macy plotline so quickly, but I also wanted to play with a longer captivity with some gaslighting and mental manipulation of my favorite witch. Like, turning her into a weapon against her sisters kind of mental manipulation. I'm loving this season so far.

Macy flicks away the last droplets of hellfire clinging to her fingers. They drift and settle as ash on the face of what was up until recently a demon of the malignant race. “I think the lil fucker cut me,” she murmurs.

Harry, by her side like he grew from her shadow, runs his fingers down her left arm. “He did.” He pulls his hand away and shows her the blood staining his fingertips. It wells from her bicep and holy crap banana she goes from thinking that she’s been cut to knowing it as the adrenaline wears off. “Sorry that my healing powers are on the blink.”

She shrugs. “It’s okay. You can’t help it and it’s not like my telekinesis is any better. Without my demon powers I’d be totally useless.”

“You could never be,” he says, and rolls her sleeve up. The cut he reveals is long, ragged and deep. Two shorter, shallower cuts flank it. “Malignant claws aren’t venomous thank goodness, not like their bites, or you might well lose the arm. I think that I can tend to this at home.”

“Okay… let’s do this thing, then.” She hates orbing, always feels dizzy and disoriented when they do it even though she knows it is perfectly safe. She cannot shake the image of Commander Sonak and his companion from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. She hears the female officer’s shriek in her ears and recalls the planetside transporter operator’s words… “Enterprise, what we got back didn’t live long. Fortunately.”

So yeah, orbing sucks total monkey but it hasn’t turned her inside out. Yet. Which is more than can be said for every demon that they have met. All of them are terrible in their own, special way from haughty primordials to malignants, her personal least favorite. It could be because all of them are filled with venom and acid and are more than willing to share it through a wild variety of methods or more simply because there are just so damned many of them. Macy feels often like she cannot turn over in her sleep without finding a malignant demon in the bed beside her.

Finding Harry there each morning has been a way better experience, she reflects, and sits on a stool in their bedroom. Her arm is laid bare now and she hisses at the furrows dug into her flesh and the puffy skin around them. Even if malignant venom cannot be transferred by their claws she’s pretty sure an epidemiologist’s delight of infections can be and she cannot even imagine (and to be fully honest with herself doesn’t really want to) where those claws might have been.

He sits on the bed, beside where her arm is laid on an old terrycloth towel, and sets a first aid kit the size of a contractor’s toolbox between his feet. “Healing you the old fashioned way seems to require a bit more in the way of preparation.”

“It’ll help to keep your skills sharp,” she says. He rinses the ragged furrows in her flesh with cold water then dabs them dry with gauze. Stinging alcohol follows the cold water, then betadine, and she flinches away from it.

He smiles. “You’re going to make me spill this all over the bed. It’ll stain.”

“I’ll change the sheets,” she says. “Be gentle… you know how big a pain wimp I am.”

“The pain wimp who tears her way through malignants left and right with primordial energy while they rip at her with their talons,” he says, dabbing. “The pain wimp that contained the source of all magic within herself without bursting at the seams.”

“Okay, sure, sure,” she says. “But that’s different pain. That’s, like, ‘spiritual warfare save the world from demons,’ pain. I can handle that pain. This is normal pain and I am just completely not here for that.”

“I also seem to remember you burning yourself quite badly on a stove without feeling it.”

“That’s just because my stupid demon powers know enough to make me not feel heat sometimes while not actually making me immune to it. We’re lucky that Seattle is so overcast or it would be sunstroke central for Macy.”

“Could it be,” he says while binding her wounds with a clean bandage, “that the demon powers don’t work as well as they could because you have not fully embraced that part of your nature?”

She frowns and flexes her fingers to make sure that the cling is not wrapped too tightly. “What do you mean?”

“Giving the primordial demonic side of your nature reign from time to time, doing more than just summoning a short burst of hellfire during battle and then suppressing it could be what you need to ascend to the next level of your powers. You could maybe even rescue your sisters from the prison that they’ve been trapped in since the incident with the kyron queen.”

She blinks as if to clear cobwebs from her head, but doesn’t even feel the segment of her consciousness where they have settled. “I don’t remember Safe Space Seattle being a prison. It was kinda nice even if there was a little West Coast pod people hipster vibe going on there.”

“The glamour is strong, isn’t it?” he says. “Even now you’re still under its effects. Think of poor Mel and Maggie there like rats in a cage--or a witch in a malignant’s pot.”

Macy grimaces. “That is never gonna get any less gross. You know that, don’t you? Why, I mean…” She waves her hands. “Humans are greasy. And gristly. I know because I’ve done cadaver dissection and we do not, let me repeat do not look like we would taste good.”

“It’s the savour of a witch’s pain, terror and despair that excites them.”

“Ah, so… they’re more like metaphysical foodies, then?”

“For lack of a better term, yes, and for lack of another one they are a kind of vampire.”

“Vampire?” Macy scoffs. “Whoa now, son… I have consumed more vampire related media in my life than is entirely healthy and vampires are cool, sexy, sophisticated aristocrats from Eastern Europe and malignants are none of those things. They are ghouls at absolute best.”

“Not vampires, then, but ghouls are eaters of the dead and you have seen that the malignants need not necessarily have even killed their victims before the feast begins.”

Macy remembers the mewling remains of what had been a witch and shudders. “Yeah…” She sighs. “It’s just weird, you know… I’m talking about vampires and ghouls and demons like they’re actual things which, depressingly and shockingly, they are.”

“They are,” he says. “And you must prepare to face them before long.”

“Again.”

“Again.”

She sighs.

He slides his arm around her shoulders and draws her close. “Be brave, Macy, and be strong. You are the strongest, bravest woman I know. You may not be quite a nuclear weapon but you are at the very least the magical equivalent of an aircraft carrier. Mel and Maggie are counting on you to free them from Safe Space before anything happens.”

“I know.” And she does. It’s going to be hard--the glamour on Safe Space is strong, after all, and Harry has warned her. The whole time she is fighting the demons it will look like she is butchering the sweet, weird innocent people who greeted them on their arrival. Swan, Jordan, Kat--all of them, apparently, are monsters holding her sisters hostage. Some of them might even put on faces that look like Mel or Maggie to confuse her, Harry said. So she must be ruthless. She must be strong.

She will be strong.

“I’m coming Mel, I’m coming Maggie,” she whispers. And even if it is hard it will be all right. She’s the oldest, after all, and looking after your kid sisters is what the oldest does. Even a lifelong only child like Macy has watched enough heartwarming family dramedies to know that. And so she will, even if it hurts. She will unleash the hellfire and do what must be done.


End file.
